Unpackthis

Take three recent (2007) graduates of the MA in Youth and Family Ministry. Add the technological marvels of Skype. Mix in a book by a professor in the program, and you get a guy at his house playing with his dog, another at a local coffee and pastry establishment, and one on his bed at his house discussing youth ministry.

The three less than creative minds behind unpackthis.com had a nice 30-40 minute discussion (after dialing each other several times, and having someone in Chicago drop out continually) on the history of youth ministry, as researched by a certain Andy Root.

Have we been doing it all wrong? Can modern ministry simply be explained as a commodity that has been sold to the white Protestant world? Will Andy in Chicago ever be able to stay online with us again?

Tune in to this space regularly as we will try to decipher the full extent of what our esteemed professor’s book means in the pragmatic programming and philosophy of a youth ministry wanting to be theological.

In the meantime, don’t panic just yet. After all, most of us came from the youth ministries described in the opening chapters of Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation.